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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

I continue to be a little confused by the distinction between Google, Google Research and DeepMind. Google Research, had made this announcement about 24-hour forecasting just 2 weeks ago: https://blog.research.google/2023/11/metnet-3-state-of-art-n... (which is also mentioned in the GraphCast announcement from today)

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DeepMind recently merged with the Brain team from Google Research to form `Google DeepMind`. It seems this was done to have Google DeepMind focused primarily (only?) on AI research, leaving Google Research to work on other things in more than 20 research areas. Still, some AI research involves both orgs, including MetNet in weather forecasting.

In any case, GraphCast is a 10-day global model, whereas MetNet is a 24-hour regional model, among other differences.

Good explanation. Now that both the 24-hour regional and 10-day global models have been announced in technical/research detail, I supposed there might still be a general blog post about how improved forecasting is when you search for "weather" or check the forecast on Android.

IIRC the MetNet announcement a few weeks ago said that their model is now used when you literally Google your local weather. I don't think it's available yet to any API that third party weather apps pull from, so you'll have to keep searching "weather in Seattle" to see it.

It's also used, at least for the high resolution precipitation forecast, in the default Android weather app (which is really part of the "Google" app situation).

Any idea why it is still showing the "weather.com" link next to the forecast?

Most likely explanation would be that Weather.com signed a contract with Google X years ago to have something placed there, and nobody wants to do the work to do anything about it.

That would require your local weather service to use these models

Is there a colab example (and/or have they released the models) for MetNet like they have here for GraphCast?

MetNet-3 is not open-source, and the announcement said it's already integrated into Google products/services needing weather info. So, I'd doubt there's anything like a colab example.

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